Steven Harnad and Owen Cliffe provide pertinent criticisms of the use of
visitation indexes I suggested for encouraging the uploading of eprints. I
think the balance of comments is fair as it stands.

Owen Cliffe mentions two sites www.advogato.org and www.slashdot.org. I
visited them and read through the automated moderation system of pieces and
associated comments upon them. Steven Harnad has always pointed out that
newsgroups are world web graffiti. But these comment pages were a joy to
read: clear, sharp, pertinent and relevant. May be this has something to do
with the nature of free software developers being a special breed of people
but it could be that automated moderation systems
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml and
http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=special;page=faq provides effective peer
quality control at least for short comments, if not for longer more serious
issues. The latter idea seems plausible since an automated system for
quality controlling free software development "group trust metrics for
peer certification", has been developed
http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html . Software development is not
science publication, but is it so different that the peer quality control
of the fromer might not suggest directions for the future of the latter?

>Taking online open-submission news sites as an example,
>monitored, peer-review ranking systems seem a highly effective way of
>accurately monitoring interest in papers. (News sites like
>www.advogato.org and www.slashdot.org use inter-related ratings schemes
>where a given item's rating is determined as a function of the authors
>credibility level, which intern is determined by both the rankings given
>to the authors previous submissions and a separate peer-to-peer ranking
>system where one author directly rates another. The former is the
>mechanism that google employs to rank its search results.)
>
>Owen Cliffe

Dr. John R. Skoyles
6 Denning Rd,
Hampstead, NW3 1SU
London, UK

In the autumn, I will be at the London School of Economics, Centre for
Philosophy of Natural and Social Science.